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As many expected, Sony has officially announced the PS4 at the Sony PlayStation Meeting today. The new PlayStation will have an X86 processor, "state of the art" GPU, 8 GB of high-speed unified memory, and a hard drive for local storage. The PS4 will allow gamers to share their gameplay stream and even remotely take control of friend's games. Along with the PS4, Sony has unveiled a new DualShock 4 controller which features a built-in touchpad at the center of the controller, and a built-in microphone jack.

I Hope so ! some standard of some kind HID profile... Sony controllers are some of the best and if they want people to say nice things about them simply make them the standard that everyone hacks things with how much press did the Wee get because they used standards...

Hell, no! Maybe the build quality is good, but the Dualshock is quite uncomfortable. When I got a PS2, first thing I did was order a Phoenix Revolution [over-blog.com], which lets you swap the buttons and sticks around. Of course, after you set it like an Xbox 360 pad, there's no reason to ever change them again. And if you have a PS3, looks like Gioteck [gioteck.com] has some pads in this same 360 style that most gamers favor now.

Bah! Only oversized, ham-fisted goatteed johnny-come-lately-to-gaming-because-of-halo dudebro-gamers prefer the oversized Xbox controller or it's layout. Us real gamers who have been playing since the PSone prefer the Holy Dual Shock.

All friendly taunting aside, I have seen that larger guys do seem to prefer the Xbox controller, personally I can't stand it.

The one thing that has kept consoles alive today was the fact that they weren't x86. You want to play Halo 4? Buy a '360, because the binaries are not only encoded but compiled for a completely different architecture (PowerPC). You want to play Killzone 2 or 3 or MGS4? Buy a PS3, because it's the same thing.

Now that they're pushing "supercharged PC architectures" (what the hell does that even mean?)- how long until we see a hypervisor or bootloader that fires up the next-gen console OS on a bog standard PC that otherwise has similar specifications to the equivalent console?

Sony must have some insane dedicated hardware security in that system, because if they don't and it's just a tiny little 8-pin TPM chip- someone is going to blow that thing wide open, and then there won't be any point to buying a PS4 at all. Just partition your existing PC or buy a spare $59 hard drive, stick the PS4 GameOS on that, and play all the PS3 "exclusives" without even owning a PS4.

I'm sure they were worried about piracy before, but man- I can't see how they're *not* shitting bricks over that right now with the switch to x86, unless they've got some killer hardware TPM coprocessor that is handling encryption and decryption on a SOC, completely self-contained and relatively unbreakable (until someone decaps the thing and reads out the bits under a microscope).

Total speculation on my part, but it sounds like the GPU and CPU are all on the same die and so I'd guess they'll put whatever security they're using in there.

Again, me speculating, but I'd guess the reason for switching to a X86 architecture has a lot to do with lowering their development costs. Anything custom they do need to develop, such as the GPU (assuming they're not using something off the shelf) they can also sell on their laptops... maybe?

Sony going x86 makes a very strong argument for Valve building their Steam Box. I'm surprised nobody else has pointed this out here yet. Assuming Unreal and iDTech5/6 have linux support (Unity already does) most developers will only need a recompile if their code is relatively clean. I'm curious which direction Microsoft will choose for their CPU. Right now Valve's Steam Box offering is sounded pretty level headed.

The PS4 will use its own custom OS. That OS will have binary blob drivers that talk to completely undocumented hardware. They will not be generic - throwing in any GPU won't work, it will have to be exactly the same one as the PS4 has and you won't be able to buy it.

Basically there is zero chance of creating a hypervisor/VM for your PC I'm afraid.

As my console friends remind me. There's a much greater simplicity and ease of use of the consoles versus the PCs in their eyes.

They will still buy consoles, for the same reason that your parents don't run virtualized environments to emulate other operating systems, and the same reason that most people I've met haven't cracked their Wii... it's all too complicated and frustrating for them. This doesn't preclude other people setting it up for them, but they often don't feel comfortable with it.

As my console friends remind me. There's a much greater simplicity and ease of use of the consoles versus the PCs in their eyes.

They will still buy consoles, for the same reason that your parents don't run virtualized environments to emulate other operating systems, and the same reason that most people I've met haven't cracked their Wii... it's all too complicated and frustrating for them. This doesn't preclude other people setting it up for them, but they often don't feel comfortable with it.

And this is exactly why Sony and Microsoft are barking up the wrong tree by going after the "hardcore" market. People who play console games are casual gamers. This is why the Wii won the last generation, even the PS2 owes its success to casual games like Guitar Hero and Buzz. The Wii was so successful because it was simple, casual fun. Games for average people not for gamers (nothing wrong with that, I have a Wii so I can play games with my non-gamer friends).

If I want to play the latest game for a PC, I have to check the specs, buy a new video card every year.

I'm still using a GTX260 from 2008. It still meets the Recommended specs for games like Skyrim. "Recommended", not "minimum"; and I can play with graphics settings on "high" without issue. Admittedly I ~am~ now starting to look at upgrading it in the near future, but its pushing 5 years now and I could probably squeeze another year or three out of it.

I'll have to upgrade the CPU and RAM every 2 years or so as well.

A core 2 quad (Q6600) from 2007 is still perfectly fine for pretty much everything on the market today.

A decent gaming rig will set me back $1500 and be a money sink.

None of that has been true for 5+ years. A decent gaming rig costs $600. For that you can get a very solid budget oriented system. And you won't have to upgrade it for several years.

At $1500 you are buying premium brand power supplies with modular interconnects, brand name RAM, deluxe motherboards, nice big solid state primary drives, and seriously flirting with the idea of SLI graphics.

How easy would it be to emulate the old cell processor on the new hardware to support old titles?Also, its been made clear by the industry that reselling of games is not the way to the future, delivery (and payment) on demand is.When you control the delivery mechanism, you control the money flow.

How easy would it be to emulate the old cell processor on the new hardware to support old titles?

You, I, or any slashdot user would likely find it an enormously difficult task. However, Sony has financial resources that likely exceed the net wealth of all active slashdot users combined, and has had plenty of time to figure this out. They did not decide this afternoon to use an X86 CPU for the PS4, they made the decision some time ago and could have started on the Cell emulation back then if they so wanted to.

Also, its been made clear by the industry that reselling of games is not the way to the future, delivery (and payment) on demand is.

True, but if you forcefully disconnect users from their existing libraries they might not b

The Cell processor is what, roughly 6 PPC cores at 3.something GHz?The PS4 has 8 x64 cores at (according to previous comments in this thread) 2GHz.

There's a pretty low real-world cap on the performance of dynamic recompilation. Don't forget that since we're dealing with consoles (very specific hardware target, you also face the complete loss of optimization from compilers that built for the peculiarities of the Cell (cache sizes, which instructions are fastest, etc.) when that CPU bust be emulated or the co

One of the most damning things to me is the lack of backwards compatibility (at least, far as I can tell from the Engadget feed I've been sort of following). I lost all interest in the PS3 when they stopped including PS2/1 compatibility (yes, I know I can find older, used systems, but screw Sony). Considering the library many gamers have, I don't think that having one prior console's worth of compatibility is asking too much, especially to help boost early sales if the launch library is less than tremendous.

But a part of this that I find highly interesting that there's no mention of physical media. Plenty of talk about the cloud, downloading games in the background and playing them as they download (I will be highly interested to see how this works out, if at all), and an internal hard drive... but no physical media. I mean, BluRay is the obvious choice for Sony, but not a mention either in the Ars article or the Engadget feed (unless I missed it.) Even the concise "Informed System Architecture" shows all your regular parts of a system... except the media.

Gaming PCs have a stonking great discrete GPU that plugs into the motherboard, and requires its own connection(s) to the PSU. Now what if this graphics card, with fantastically massive RAM bandwidths that Intel can only dream about, suddenly had EIGHT x86 CPU cores inserted into the GPU chip? What if this graphic card was given a 'Southbridge' chip for all the usual inputs and outputs found on the motherboard? Obviously, the graphics card would become the entire PC, with no need for the motherboard at all.

This is what AMD has created. NOT a CPU with inbuilt graphics that need to share a horrendously slow CPU bus (2x64 bits), but a GPU with inbuilt CPU cores, sharing an insanely fast GPU RAM bus, and using a common memory addressing model (HSA).

AMDs designs are light-years beyond those from Intel. Intel's great plan is to build a CPU with a massive companion RAM chip die for the GPU, just like the PlayStation 2 (yes TWO- you know that long obsolete console from many years ago). This Intel CPU is so mega-expensive, only ultra pricey laptops can afford to use it, but none will because ultra pricey laptops need graphics from ATI or Nvidia in order to sell. In other words, Intel's new Haswell GPU initiative is a bust before the first chip even hits the market.

Now the market awaits AMD to become really sane, and sell complete single board PC solutions that follow the design philosophy of the PS4- in other words a single board designed around the GPU, with 8GB of GPU memory soldered on, and the CPU cores contained within the GPU, leeching of the unified HSA GPU bus. Obviously these single-board PC systems can use far more powerful GPU designs than the PS4 because they will need far more power and cooling.

Now that the CPU no longer has to render graphics or decode video, the CPU is left with less and less to do on the PCs used by 99.9% of people, driving Intel's advantage into the ground. Metrics like GPU performance and memory bandwidth are increasingly important, even outside of games. The collapse of the price of DRAM means that memory should have been provided soldered to the motherboard years back, allowing much better quality of data signal = bigger possible bandwidth. Simple computer science 'cache' theory shows that very few people will benefit from more than 8GB, and this 8GB of DRAM should be acting as a level-4 cache to the SSD drive anyway.

Expect the new consoles to cause a massive re-think of the design of the desktop PC, to Intel's extreme disadvantage. Sony and MS are not mugs, and went to AMD for an entire PC-based solution for a very good reason. And both are building products designed to have a 7+ year lifetime.

Doesn't work like that. Frequency, instruction set efficiency, and parallel execution are different aspects of a modern processor. You can't just lump them all togeather and brand it an i5ish CPU. Which BTW is a false comparison anyways as an i5 has four real cores.

Benchmark-wise, an FX 8350, the 8-core top-end Piledriver, is considered comparable to the i5 3570. The i5 generally takes a large lead in single-threaded performance, but the FX leads on the more parallel stuff. Still effectively a tie, especially with the mere $10 price difference. People I know tend to go Intel, since it's cooler and (if you spring $30 for the 3570K version) it overclocks better, but for most purposes they can be considered equivalents.

However, the 8350 is clocked at 4.0GHz, precisely twice that the PS4 is rumored to have (the detailed specs were not shown tonight, but the stuff that was matches up exactly with what the leaked specs claimed so I'm treating them as reasonably accurate). So it is a reasonable conclusion that the PS4 chip would run approximately half as fast as the FX-8350. Yes, cache hit rates, memory controller clocks and all that will affect it, but at the end of the day, the processor has to run instructions, and if it does that at half the rate, it's running slower. (And yes, you can compare the PS4 and FX clock-for-clock, because they're the same architecture (at least as far as my information goes)).

I simply used i3/i5 as a reference, as they are both more generic names than FX-4300/FX-8350, and Intel has a larger market share and brand awareness, so their labels make for better shorthand.

The resolution for TVs will still be 1080p so its not like theres going to be much need for more GPU horsepower and anything more than 30fps is wasted on a TV anyway. Games haven't significantly increased CPU requirements in the past few years and I cant see it changing any time soon.

Games companies don't need anything more than this to churn out CoD14 & Sims7. They're content to throw out one disappointment after another because they know that ultimately the public will buy it.

This is going to be the current level of "console port" for the foreseeable future. To be honest i'm pleasantly surprised. If anything it increases the chances that more console games will make their way to the PC given the similar architecture. I'm just glad they didn't go the other way and use ARM to make ports to mobile platforms easier (or consoles getting the karmic "mobile ports")

I'd also be glad if graphics stagnated in games for the next 6 years. It might force one or two games companies to improve other parts of the games instead like gameplay.

The resolution for TVs will still be 1080p so its not like theres going to be much need for more GPU horsepower and anything more than 30fps is wasted on a TV anyway.

GPU power increases are not only used to driver higher resolutions or framerates; they are also used to increase model detail level, add additional effects, and otherwise improve the quality of the graphics. Also, many modern TVs are able to display 50 and/or 60 fps quite comfortably, so suggesting faster than 30fps is wasted on a TV seems illogical -- no more so than it would be wasted on a monitor.

It might force one or two games companies to improve other parts of the games instead like gameplay.

That is more a problem with gamers, not games. As we get older, less things fascinate us. Take any video game of the XX century and compare with a modern game side by side - you'll see how crude and rude that was, yet people tend to rememeber old games fondly for gameplay. But if you start looking for actually good gameplay ideas in games of the past, you'll find that a) most of them have been reimplemented since then, and improved upon b) there was less variety in gameplay back then than it is today. It is astonishing that games fascinated more (comparatively) people in 1980s and 1990s than they are today - probably related to the fact that computers were still new.

Those are *not* Bulldozer cores! They are more similar to the lower-end Jaguar cores that are going into AMD's tablet & netbook products. They are still a major step up from the actual cores in the Cell (those SPE things are not really "cores"), but even a Bulldozer core will be more powerful than these things on a clock for clock basis.

The good news is the GPU is pretty nice for this type of system and the power consumption should be quite good, so heat won't be an issue. Definitely a huge step up from PS3 hardware, and "console ports" won't suck so bad since this thing is basically a real PC.

Why do people, especially here, keep saying that you save money with a console? It may have other benefits (like not having to install game DRM on a general use machine, for family use, where the entertainment system should be isolated etc), but saving money is not one of them. You buy an EXTRA machine OVER your desktop. A gaming desktop is cheaper than a non-gaming desktop PLUS a console. And then there is console tax over games and multi-player, which when accounted, practically compensates the gaming component cost.

Having 2 devices has some advantages, but that's a different matter. PC GPUs can have 7yr life cycles too... if you are happy with 7 yr old settings... which is for most part (console graphics appear to improve over time, partly because the quality of early titles, aside from token exclusives, is poor. The difference is not so great that later titles will get you 1080p instead of 720p) is what you get with consoles anyway. Most recent games, will play on a 8800 (XBOX 360 had a 8800 while the PS3 had a 7800 to compensate the Cell's GPU failings) at 720p and medium to low settings. You only needed a PC refresh in between if you fancied 1080p or more, better physics, textures and tessellation since, that current consoles cannot deliver anyway. In short, PCs *appear* to have shorter life-cycles because *you* want more stuff... because upgrade is an *option*.

Personally, I prefer getting a mid-range GPU, a year after the consoles are released. My GTX 260, inexpensively bought on a sale, has at least another 2 years in it. PC gaming is NOT expensive.

I have a 10 year old PC. Granted, it was built for some upgradability, and has received some. But with a 10 year old MB, there's only so much I can do (and the only thing left I can do is storage). It runs great for what it does, but would not play the newest games with ease. A second machine is required for games. The only question is, PC or console for the second PC. You present it as discarding a PC for a console. I'd say most people are not making that choice. And, given the sames of consoles, I

Price. It will probably cost $500. A similarly equipped Windows PC would be $1,000+

No, no it would not. Jaguar isn't actually out yet, but it's replacing Bobcat so let's take a look at the cost of that. I can get a top of the line Bobcat CPU with 4GB of RAM *in a laptop* for $350 - that's $350 for the complete laptop. Now, granted, it doesn't have the same video card. But if we look at the 1.8 TFLOP number Sony provided, we see that lines up with about the Radeon 7770 - that costs $100. Remove the laptop stuff you don't need (battery, screen, etc...) and add the video card and as a desktop unit you'd probably be looking at about $300-400. In fact you can buy a desktop with 3ghz A-10 APU and 8GB of RAM which will *destroy* the PS4 on the CPU front for $550.

In other words, the random $1,000+ you pulled out your ass is completely made up and has no basis whatsoever in reality. And if the PS4 is priced at $500, that would be a ripoff.

Console games aren't that much different from PC games. Slightly so, yes, but not significantly. They mostly run on the same engine anyways (it felt like half this generation ran on UE3), so you won't see too much a difference. I could just as easily point out that different games have non-comparable workloads - does a particle-heavy game like Call of Duty or Mass Effect have the same load as an AI-heavy open-world game like Skyrim or GTA?

I just ssh'd into my linux machine at work (which has a Gnome UI going) and ran top, and it says that 99.7% of the CPU is idle, with 0.25% used by top.

I'm on a Win 7 box right now (quad-core 2GHz Sandy Bridge laptop), with a gazillion Firefox etc. tabs open. The CPU may well not be running at its highest clock speed, but it reports about 10% CPU usage -- from "FlashPlayerPlugin.exe", presumably because I'm streaming 1080p video with no GPU assist on the decode. Firefox itself, along with "System", are using 1% CPU.

For latency-sensitive applications, yes. It doesn't matter if the overall CPU usage is 1%, if all of that 1% happens at very inconvenient points of time. It's also problematic if the other processes on your desktop are thrashing your memory hierarchy—that's much easier to control on an appliance-like device.

On the consoles, the OS is basically like a "library" rather than a "layer" the game sits on top. That and the OS doesn't constantly swap out your threads and trash registers/L1/L2 in order to run itself. This isn't really a secret.

A dedicated gaming console doesn't have the desktop OS overhead to deal with. You can squeeze more out of less in this case. Especially with devs working to a fixed target.

The key element there is the fixed target, you know what features the hardware supports - for example what GPU extensions are available, how much GPU memory, main memory and cache you have and at what speed it is, how many CPU cores and shader processors you have and how fast they are, what your bus speeds are, etc... Having these as concrete values allows you to tune your applications much more finely and you can avoid many abstraction layers.

PC ports: Should be less expensive to develop and optimize now.PC mods?: If only these can be turned into full desktops. Sony... largest, accidental maker of gaming PCs:-). The irony would be sweet.Or perhaps PS4 OS on commodity PC hardware, ala Hackintosh. Better forced GPU features for your PS4 games.Emulation should also be more efficient when PS4 emulators emerge years later.

I noticed (as did many other people) that game developers only started taking advantage of multi-core CPUs on the desktop once console programming also required it. The big huge console gaming target is a good way to push developers into supporting new technologies.

> So what exactly is gonna differentiate this from a mid-level to high-end gaming rig?

It's completely different: Before "the uses of living room consoles were in flux" but now "The living room is no longer the center of the PlayStation ecosystem; the player is.". Duh! Do try and keep up!

So what exactly is gonna differentiate this from a mid-level to high-end gaming rig?

Using unified GDDR5 memory is going to be really interesting. They quote 176GB/s -- the DDR3 in your high-end gaming rig is pushing maybe 50GB/s. It's not going to excel at purely GPU-bound stuff compared to a PC, but for things which require the GPU and CPU to work together (like, say, games), it should be incredibly fast.

There's also the thing about OS overhead -- Windows/Linux do a lot to ensure the kernel won't be brought down by a driver/GPU failure. John Carmack and others have lamented about how terribly inefficient it is, and that it allows console games to look remarkably close to much higher-speced PCs.

Sony is a Japanese company and PS4 will be manufactured in China. (which is, by the way, country ruled by communist party)So the only way US could prevent exporting anything, would be by preventing AMD from selling their APUs (manufactured in Taiwan) to Sony.

Actually this is the long-awaited stealth revival of IBM's PC division -- the PS/4. Internally it runs IBM's new Linux distribution, OS/4, and have the new integrated high-speed peripheral serial bus, MCA-Wire.

No there actually are many more, only that the didn't receive the media coverage. Have a look how they handle customer warranty claims. Some of the things I've read:

* Customer charged $120 + freight for one screw replacement to hold his laptop together.* PS3 customer told his warranty is void because he used a power board rather than plugging the PS3 directly into a wall socket.* PS3 customer told his PS3 was fully covered by warranty but he'd get charged over $150 for freight to have it returned.

Yes, i know, Sony is an evil company. So is Microsoft. If I just want to play games, nothing you list affected me. The rootkit fiasco wasn't about games at all - it was about music CDs, which is basically a completely different division of Sony. Stripping Linux may have ticked off some geeks, but it wasn't anything useful for gaming at all. And while the George Hotz case may have been gaming related - if you just wanted to play legal games, not pirate them and cheat, then it was

OtherOS: removal didn't affect anyone, Linux on the PS3 was terrible. Anyone that used it could have told you that.

That's not the point. The point is I paid for it and they removed it. It is not unlike a car owner taking his car in for an oil change and the manufacturer removing the radio... It's not the radio... it's the principle of Sony being jerks.

You can keep your PS4 and XBox 720. I am not interested. Save your fanboy slobbering for the Sony forums.